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How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!
Honore de Balzac -
Glory and fame mean twelve thousand francs' worth of paid articles in the newspapers and five thousand crowns' worth of dinners.
Honore de Balzac
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Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.
Honore de Balzac -
No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.
Honore de Balzac -
Women are as they are; they necessarily have the defects of their virtues.
Honore de Balzac -
A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct.
Honore de Balzac -
A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
Honore de Balzac -
Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
Honore de Balzac
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He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things.
Honore de Balzac -
There are words which cut like steel.
Honore de Balzac -
The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.
Honore de Balzac -
Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.
Honore de Balzac -
The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
Honore de Balzac -
According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on.
Honore de Balzac
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When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
Honore de Balzac -
A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life.
Honore de Balzac -
It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
Honore de Balzac -
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
Honore de Balzac -
The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes.
Honore de Balzac -
Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.
Honore de Balzac
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If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.
Honore de Balzac -
It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence.
Honore de Balzac -
Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.
Honore de Balzac -
Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.
Honore de Balzac